With her back against the wall, she scrutinized the brightly lit expanse between ramp and trees—her only means of escape. Not more than ten yards long, it remained unapproachable, men roaming the area, others no doubt positioned at the windows above to thwart any attempt. The light had to go, and it had to go in a hurry. Staring straight ahead, she saw the small locked box, keypad and electronic wires no doubt within. Wrong choice! The voice was adamant. Short out the circuits? Think! Would he have been so careful with his wine and so foolish with his wiring? There seemed only one reasonable choice. Stooping to the man whose chest now resembled a concave oval, she took his gun and began to frisk the body—one round of ammunition, wallet, credit cards, cash, and driver’s license. Slipping them into her pockets, she scampered to the edge of the ramp—still in shadow—checked the silencer, and fired five shots into the high beams forty feet above her.
The response was immediate. The sudden sea of black beyond the ramp exploded in a burst of voices and movement. Sprinting from her cover, she darted across the rays of light still pouring from the living room windows, enough to provoke a storm of gunfire to her right as she zigzagged her way closer and closer to the trees. Flashlight beams began to whip across the grounds, one or two inadvertently giving her a point of reference, glancing off several branches to guide her steps. As she reached the fringe of trees, a sudden flash of light burst from behind her, dousing her in its predatory glow, able only to catch her head and neck as they slipped out of sight, her body falling willfully along the rutted slide of the muddy slope.
Her rate of descent was furious, somehow her back and legs finding a path among the gnarled stumps and trees, nothing to guide her but the mountain’s natural seam. She couldn’t be sure how many were following, her ears lost to the thundering brush of leaves and branches that swatted at her, her hands held as funnels to her face, knuckles battered in an unrelenting frenzy. As the gradient began to level, she slowed, enough to find her feet, arms now slashing out in front of her, the sound of water rising below enough to quicken her pace. Once again, lights from above streaked the trees around her, everything growing denser, the nooks less tangible with each step, only the sound of the water prodding her along through the clawing scrape of woods.
How many minutes passed, she couldn’t tell, but her knees began to ache, her feet slipping, shoulder and side slamming to the brambled ground with a violent crash. Only the immediate arrival of another steep descent saved her head from certain impact, this time the trees less intrusive, the sudden appearance of stars and moon the first indication of clearing. The trees continued to thin as she tried to peer over her careening legs, her eyes seeing what she had hoped to find—an endless pit of black vacancy less than thirty feet in front of her. With a sudden release, she felt the ground disappear, her body tumble forward, aware for only an instant of the rush of moving water everywhere before it enfolded her.
All bearings vanished, everything in slow motion, eyes searching for the surface as her arms struggled against the current. Nearly a minute passed before she broke through the water. The full moon flooded the scene, her body twisting round to examine the walls of soil perhaps thirty yards apart that were funneling her away from the lighted beacon of Tieg’s hillside perch, now a good hundred yards behind. No sign of pursuit broke the stillness, her head just above the surface, her eyes fixed on the area just below the house as flashlight beams suddenly appeared, laserlike in their probing. One or two skimmed the water, Sarah quick to duck under, waiting as long as she could before resurfacing, the lights slipping from sight as the gorge began to bend her away from the glare. Her legs, only a short while ago burning from the strain, now began to numb under the embrace of the water. Scanning the shore, she maneuvered herself to within fifteen feet of the far bank, arms and legs wading before depositing her on a bed of silt and rock. Pausing for a moment, she pulled herself to the shore, dropped to the mud, and caught her breath, the water less comfortable dripping from clothing and hair, though tempered by a mild evening breeze.
Three minutes later, she reached the plateau above, a new gathering of trees lining a more gradual incline as she silently pulled string after string of leaves from the branches. Nature’s insulation. With the pile sufficiently high, she removed shirt and pants and began to wring out the excess water, nestling within the leaves for warmth. Two minutes later, she removed her underwear, slid her legs and arms into the clothes, and began to stuff shirt and pants with the foliage. Prickly, but efficient.
As she buried her underwear, she took stock of the last fifteen minutes. Belt, shoes, and wallet had miraculously survived. The gun was gone, but at least she had gotten a jump on the agents who would soon be swarming the area looking for … for what? The thought forced her to pause. A man? A woman? The question suddenly dawned on her. How much could they have possibly seen? And with how much accuracy? Those details, she knew, would all depend on Tieg and his desire to protect Eisenreich.
Which meant she could take a chance. Grabbing the leaves, she crawled up to a small furrow surrounded by a hillock of high grass. She would be safe there, hidden. A place for sleep.
The New York skyline was a welcome sight, clipped rays of light broken by an angularity of steel and glass driving upward through the early March afternoon. Xander peered through the plane’s porthole and saw the city as it was—hard, distant—not as a refuge but as a reflection of himself, silent and alert, eerily calm, struggling to mask the dissonance below the surface.
But it was more than just a part of himself that now stared back. Much more. It was the chaos itself, not as the arbitrary collision of time and circumstance, but as the essential and ongoing tension that sustained the vitality of each force and that lay at the core of real strength. Chaos as power’s fuel, power as chaos’s parameter, both meaningless without the other. In the city, in its controlled mania, he saw the relationship that made one the lifeblood of the other. In that moment, staring out at the buildings, Xander came to understand one very basic truth, a truth he knew Eisenreich had never fully grasped. Power craves chaos as the object of its own control; chaos seeks power as the arbiter of its own limitations. Without the one, there can be no other. Each survives through that tension. Each dominates through that unity.
Xander continued to stare into the distance, more and more aware of a similar strength growing within himself, a detached self-mastery made possible only by his own inner turmoil—power as a response to that confusion. Entranced by the stark patterns below, he realized he had become more accustomed to the game, the voice inside less a command from Feric or Sarah than from himself. Slowly, he was beginning to cultivate the instinct, to create a reality that made sense of the last week, an internal will that both frightened and relieved him. The episode on the subway had made certain of that. He was discovering a strange duality of needs—one that sought to contain the mayhem, the other that looked to incite its frenzy so as to ensure a constant challenge. The last ten hours had granted a momentary respite from that struggle—even with the change of planes and the nervous few hours he had spent at Heathrow. Thirty thousand feet above the chaos, he had had time to think, to evaluate, but not in the ways he had relied on in the past. Theory had no place now. Eisenreich had made that all too clear, the last two days altering his perception completely.
And yet, there was the other reality, the small leather-bound books that he had forced himself to pore over during the flight, forced because he had been afraid to return to their world, to let his guard down, to recapture that simplicity. More so because he had begun to question his own capacity. Staring at them, turning their pages, he no longer saw them as relics to be admired and discussed. They each had meaning, purpose beyond the theory. Of course, he tried to convince himself that he had known it all along, that he had reveled in the impact such books could have, but the real questions remained. Had he ever truly seen beyond the theoretical? No. He had taken the easy way out, dismissed them as absurd, rejected them as madness, and thus ig
nored their truth. Even a few days ago, rifling through the texts, he had not allowed himself to believe in their application. They’re books! They offer nothing more than the thrill of discovery. Nothing else! Somehow, he had let the truth of Eisenreich’s first trial slip from his mind. He had allowed himself to read the theory as little more than the fuel for an academic flight of fancy. Now, staring into a vacant sky, he knew far better. Now he had witnessed their power firsthand.
And that power was no more clear than in the prescriptions set forth in the second volume. Xander once again flipped open the book, aware that he had seen its methods, its brutality, not on the pages in front of him but in a small house in Wolfenbüttel, on a train from Saltzgitter. How to create chaos, how to build from it, how to cultivate hatred—the three central chapters, the three most damning statements of Eisenreich’s vision. Now, reading through the words again, Xander knew what the men devoted to that vision planned to unleash; Washington, the grain market—they had merely been a promise of things to come. Minor disruptions at first—perhaps not even genuine threats—but events serious enough to raise questions about security in the simple minds of the people. Next, they would cultivate that doubt into panic, depict the smaller episodes as symptoms of a larger problem, one that would demand drastic measures. That problem—the one Eisenreich had so cannily latched onto all those centuries ago—was nothing more than moral decay. Simple, but accurate. How better to manipulate the public than to play up to its pious indignity? How better to rouse a people than to rattle their sense of self-righteousness? And Xander knew there would be plenty of that to go around. The interest groups, the Coalitions, the majorities—they were all waiting to clean the slate of its social, political, and economic corruption. Tieg had been making certain of that. Every night for the past two years. Ten million households growing more and more restless. The answer—tear everything down and start again. Make everything right. It was why Eisenreich had described chaos as “the welcome release from a general iniquity.” Chaos as savior. Chaos as moral detergent. From there, it was but a short step to control for those who wanted it. To maintain it, they would simply have to create a pariah within the state, cultivate bigotry, and thus distract the rabble. That was Eisenreich’s gift. An old trick, thought Xander, but one that had worked well enough in the past. It would work again.
Xander sat back and closed his eyes as the plane banked away from the island, the image of the little monk etched in his mind. Did you really intend all of this? Was this the vision? Was this God’s will? Xander knew there had to be more to it than the brutality Tieg and his cohorts meant to unleash. More than a tyranny of greed and power bent on stripping society of its most basic freedoms, and turning out generation after generation of mindless automatons. Yes, the theory tempted with a promise of unimagined power, but it also granted a world of order, of control. And that was what made it so seductive. Not its gift of supremacy. Not its harnessing of chaos. It was its dream of permanence through excellence that set it apart. A dream unthinkably violent beyond the page, yet tantalizing in its rhetoric.
A quick descent to the tar and grass of Kennedy Airport shook him back to the present. A final bump to the ground, and Xander opened his eyes. He stared at the manuscript, then slipped it into his briefcase. The moment for its beauty had passed. The game had begun again.
Five minutes later, a strange sensation washed over him as he stepped out onto the concourse. It might have been the same terminal from which he had left six days ago, but it was a very different Jaspers who now returned. He had left a part of himself behind, shed it so as to create a decipherable reality out of the madness of Eisenreich. Ganz had been right to recognize the finality, but he had seen only one side, only one part of that sacrifice. Xander, on the other hand, had come to understand a different kind of death, a death that came in stages, ripping at the soul until only the shell remained. He had seen it in Sarah. In Feric. And now in himself. Somewhere, he had lost the naïveté, the simple enthusiasm that had defined his every choice, his sense of purpose, and had always propelled him along, only to be violently stripped away, bit by bit—Florence, London, Wolfenbüttel—a devastating spiral from disbelief to panic to horror. Death at his own hands. Death as his reality. All that remained was a will to survive, a will he had learned to exercise with relative ease in the bowels of the Frankfurt airport.
It was that same will, that same intuition that was forcing him to concentrate on the simple order that Sarah—so close now—had left for him: Tempsten, New York. The Sleepy Hollow Motel.
“A game? And hitching doesn’t break the rules?” The young man driving the pickup couldn’t have been more than twenty, his thick upper body, grease-stained hands, and grimy coveralls—the name Jeff on his chest pocket—all in keeping with the logo Sarah had read on the passenger door: MICK’S AUTOWORKS—WE DO FOREIGN TOO.
“There a re no rules,” she answered. At least that much was true. Keep it simple. “It’s just whoever gets to Tijuana first wins the bet.”
“You got money on this?”
“Enough to keep it … worthwhile.”
“That is a great idea. I mean, really great.” He shook his head as he smiled. “And you say you got dumped in Claghorn Gorge last night just to slow you down? That’s beautiful! They’re lucky you didn’t drown or something.”
“Well, there is one rule—nothing life-threatening. And no planes. It wouldn’t be fun if you could just hop the next flight south.” If anyone asks, he’ll have to keep it simple. “I got tossed in with a life jacket. I guess they figured I’d give up once I got wet.”
“Beautiful! I mean that is absolutely beau-ti-ful!” He pounded an open palm on the steering wheel. “Hell, I wish I could drive you the whole way just to see those guys’ expressions when you show up!” He started to shake his head again. “Leaves! I’d never’ve thought of that. I’d still be in those damn woods freezing my ass off.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Sarah recalled the hour or so of fitful sleep she had stolen. “This blanket’s a welcome relief.”
“Yeah, well that’s Mick’s. He sometimes sleeps in the truck.” Jeff shrugged. “Don’t ask. Something to do with his ex-wife. Or his girlfriend. He doesn’t talk about it and … Anyway, you got lucky last night. Usually this time of year, it doesn’t get much over fifty-five. Last night, must’ve been close to sixty. Maybe sixty-two.”
“It didn’t feel that high.”
“Yeah, I guess it wouldn’t have.” He laughed. “You’re also pretty lucky I had that job out in Presterton, or else you’d have been walking for another hour, at least.”
Coming out of the curve, the young mechanic slowed and turned into a driveway, the garage logo emblazoned on a well-worn sign that swung precariously from two strands of rusted chain link. Several cars were parked on the fringe of grass separating Mick’s from the main road, a strange array of expensive German and Japanese imports that seemed out of place next to the ramshackle buildings to the rear. Inside the garage, high on a hydraulic lift, a jet black Porsche was receiving expert care from the hands of an equally greasy coveralled figure.
“That’s Mick. We do all the work ourselves.” He brought the truck to a stop and hopped out of the cab, shouting over to his partner. “Hey, hey. It was a busted fan belt. Two seconds. The guy didn’t know what was wrong. I told him next time to check it himself so he doesn’t have to pay us an arm and a leg.” Mick nodded from under the car, only now aware of Sarah, who was stepping to the gravel. “And she wants to know if she can rent a car.” Jeff moved off toward the small office.
“Rent?” Mick stepped out of the garage, wiping the grease from his hands. “We don’t rent. You know that.”
“Yeah, yeah, but listen to this,” Jeff shouted through the door as he rang up the bill for the fan belt. “She’s got some kind of bet going, see who can get to Mexico first, and last night she ends up in Claghorn with a little help from two of her bettin’ buddies. Sounds like fun, huh?”
�
��Yeah.” Mick continued to cross the gravel drive, the cloth working a patch on his neck. He kept his eyes on Sarah. “Mexico. What’s in Mexico?”
“Tijuana,” answered Sarah.
“Yeah … well, I don’t rent, and I don’t sell. I just fix. Best I can do is have Jeff run you into Glendon. That’s about twenty minutes. You can catch a bus there, or a train into San Francisco. About an hour and a half, I guess. Plenty of places there to rent a car.”
“Thanks,” said Sarah, watching Mick step into the office. A moment later, she heard traces of a hushed exchange before Mick reemerged. He kept his eyes on the ground as he stepped to the drive and dug the rag deep into his back pocket. Sarah expected to see Jeff behind him, but the office remained strangely quiet. Watching Mick move, she sensed something odd in his walk, the gait somehow too deliberate, too casual. He can’t look at me. Something was out of place, something Mick was trying to hide, the reason he was keeping his eyes low.
Every instinct told her she had to move. Stepping back to the truck, Sarah slowly opened the door and tossed the blanket in, discreetly sliding herself into the driver’s seat. With a minimum of movement, she reached for the keys that still hung from the ignition, all the while her focus on the tall mechanic. She waited until he had disappeared into the garage and then fired up the engine, shifting the truck into reverse.
Behind her, a black sedan screeched to a stop and blocked the exit, forcing her to slam on the brakes. Her entire body jerked forward, her chin and shoulder colliding from the near impact. Slightly dazed, she waited, the car behind idling, only its smoke-glazed windows quivering from the vibration. Sarah expected her captors to fly out, guns at the ready. But none came. The doors remained strangely silent. Only the hum of the engine. A minute might have passed before the sound of footsteps broke through. Even and slow, they approached from the office. She began to turn.
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